Due to damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, the Abilene Network link between Atlanta and Houston was disrupted at around 8amET on 29 August 2005 and is not currently in service. The Internet2 is working with Abilene Partner Qwest Communications, Cisco Systems providing the routers, to closely monitor the situation and to begin work to restore service as soon as possible. They do not yet have a time estimate of when service will be restored but will update the Web site as soon as more information is available. Abilene continues to provide high- performance networking capabilities to Participants and Connectors not in the affected region and will be working to contact those institutions that are affected by this outage. Internet2 is used for a variety of research projects that require extensive Internet bandwidth and/or large number-crunching and simulation abilities. At the Argonne National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility in Illinois, researchers are using the network to develop next-generation videoconferencing systems. The network also allows facilities such as the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to crunch massive amounts of astronomical data.